I'm a verbivore myself. :-) Do you ever get those e-mails about those so-called origins of certain words...all of them completely ridiculous and refutable by a glance at a dictionary?
No, but my wife, quite by coincidence, gave me a book titled, "445 Fascinating Word Origins" for Valentine's Day, which fell after this thread started. The book meets your standard of being “so-called origins of certain words...all of them completely ridiculous and refutable by a glance at a dictionary”. May be not
all of them. But the explanations generally strain credulity, seem at best speculative. (E.g., the idea that “jailbird” comes from a medieval continental custom of displaying female convicts publicly suspended cages.) And the author offers no footnotes or documentation.
I liked my 1979 edition of the American Heritage Dictionary, which has an Indo-European dictionary in the back, and traces many roots to Sanskrit, Germanic, Latin, Greek and hence to English.
There was an article about 10 years ago in the Atlantic about a new theory that all virtually languages can be traced to a common root. It was intriguing, but I do have not been following the story. I recall, that Hittite and Indo-European have been "traced" to a common ancestor and Indo-Hittite has a common ancestor with Semitic. Wish I had more time to investigate.